Whatever comes to mind!

May 31, 2014

Elliot Rodger left a 140 page document which is a truly revealing window into his soul. After reading this "manifesto", which is really more of a life history, his twisted life which led up in painful stages to his "Day of Retribution" becomes, if not excusable, at least more understandable. And understanding why people feel impelled to do these horrific acts is important if we are to come to any conclusions which just might prevent more of these situations in the future. Understanding is more important than condemning. It's not about Rodger, at this point, or his victims. Nothing can be done to bring them back. But lessons can be learned about what went wrong in this young man's life and what could have been done to deflect him from his ultimate course. After all, right up until the end he expressed some tiny bit of hope that his life would take a more positive turn, and he wouldn't be driven to commit the crimes that he did.

One of the misconceptions that the media has hastily come up with is that Rodger hated only women. For sure he was a misogynist, but he hated men equally as much, especially the cool jock type men that he fantasized women were exclusively attracted to instead of being attracted to an "intelligent gentleman" like himself. He couldn't stand the sight of a young couple holding hands on the street or (horrors) making out! It enraged him since he fantasized about all the sex they were having while he was getting none.

His jealousy, envy and rage didn't happen overnight. They built up to the breaking point over a number of years starting after he went through puberty. It got to the point where he hated both men and women whom he fantasized were having more sexual pleasure than he was. In fact his only sexual pleasure was masturbation; he never had sex with a woman. And he wasn't willing to go on living that way. In his sick mind, if he couldn't have the pleasure of making love to a beautiful blonde woman, then nobody else would have that pleasure either if he could do anything about it.

One of the major malfunctions of his sick mind was that he expected that it was girls' (collective) responsibility to provide him with sex and love. And it just wasn't any girl he wanted. He wanted a sexy, beautiful blonde. His problem was that he never put any meaningful effort into meeting, dating or establishing a relationship with any girl. He gives detailed accounts of all his playdates in childhood going back to age zero, including all the names of every kid he was ever friends with, yet he never mentions one girl whom he actually dated or who actually rejected him. He fantasized that girls rejected him because they didn't come to him and offer to have sex with him. In fact the rejections he experienced at the hands of girls were probably all fantasies.

One of the things about this manifesto is that Rodger is brutally honest about his own feelings and psychological predicaments, no matter how twisted they are. His negative feelings festered for many years until they built up to a boiling point in his own mind. He planned his "Day of Retribution" at least a year in advance. It was all about revenge for a world that didn't satisfy his needs and caused him excruciating pain although he was willing to call it off at the last minute if only a beautiful girl would have sex with him.

Rodger grew up shorter than average and not physically strong. He was always trying to fit in and regretted his lack of cool friends although he had many others. He took refuge in video games, in particular, World of Warcraft. He was so badly bullied in high school that he begged his parents to take him out of it. They did and he finished high school at continuation school, the school for dropouts that enabled them to get a high school equivalency certificate. One would have thought that he would have made some friends there since he experienced no bullying at all. Unfortunately, Rodger was a snob and considered those at continuation school to be low class losers.

Although he was the product of a broken home (his parents divorced when he was seven), he had a lot of perks due to his parents' connections to the film industry and evidently quite a lot of money in the family despite his father's financial debacle in the movie "Oh my God" that he produced. Peter Rodger was also an assistant director of The Hunger Games, a movie in which teenagers go around trying to kill each other. Elliot Rodger got to walk down the red carpet at a number of Hollywood premieres. He had an admitted taste for luxury and opulence. He became convinced that the only way out of his predicament was to become wealthy, really wealthy. He tried to convince his mother on several occasions that she should marry a rich man. He fantasized about moving into a mansion like some of his parents' rich friends owned.

As he became more and more desperate, he became convinced that he would be able to get a beautiful girlfriend if only he himself could become wealthy and the only feasible way of doing this was for him to win the lottery. He thought it was his destiny to win in order to make up for all the unfairness that he had experienced since attaining puberty. He considered that he had had a happy childhood up until that time, and he was owed this destiny. He made numerous trips to Arizona to buy Megamillion Lottery tickets at a time when they weren't offered in California. Later when it became legal in California he bought more. After each incident, his not winning left him even deeper in despair.

Finally, after giving up hope of ever having a beautiful girl by his side and having a happy life, he started making plans for a "Day of Retribution." He even planned to kill his little brother, Jazz, whom he liked, because he could see he was the outgoing type that girls would be attracted to. His stepmother, whom he hated, would have to go as well. He made his elaborate plans over the period of a year, and they were a lot more elaborate that what tragically actually happened, fortunately.

What can be learned from Rodger's life history? That he was obsessed with having something that he couldn't obtain? That he didn't have the social skills to go about getting the thing he most wanted in life? That nothing else was more important to him than losing his virginity and having sex with a beautiful blonde girl? That he fantsized about how ideal the lives were of all the beautiful people who effortlessly were able to have what he desired? That he considered the world to be unfair because women were attracted to obnoxious, alpha male, jock types instead of to intelligent gentlemen? That girls' lack of attraction to him constituted rejection? That negative feelings can build and build to the boiling point at which they explode splattering other peoples' innocent lives in their wake?

This episode also speaks to a hollow, crass culture, the props of which are guns, violent video games, material goods and sex devoid of meaningful relationships, a culture that places pleasure and entertainment above any and all ethical values.

Although Rodger had a variety of psychologists, psychiatrists and life coaches, they all failed miserably to apprehend the depth and nature of his problems or to be in a position to do anything about them. Actually, he had only one problem: how to have sex with a girl. If it could have been arranged, the tragedy in Isla Vista might never have happpened. Rodger himself was powerless to make it happen, and he, narcissistically, thought the world owed it to him without any effort on his part. Actually, his efforts, which consisted of walking around Santa Barbara waiting for a girl to approach him, were totally misguided. Being at a party school was just the wrong milieu for him. He didn't have the personality to be a casual pick-up artist. He might have tried online dating. But he was a snob that was put out that he couldn't be in the upper echelon of snobs and have everything that they had in the same way they had it. He wouldn't have lowered himself.

If any verification for the theories of Wilhelm Reich were needed, the story of this individual's life is it. Wilhelm Reich authored "The Mass Psychology of Fascism," a book which was banned in this country in the 1960s. The San Diego Free Press, to its credit, published and distributed bootleg copies of the book. Reich's main thesis was that what led to the Nazi era was sexual repression among Germans, Hitler in particular. Comparing Mein Kampf, Hitler's autobiography, to Rodger's manifesto, one can see that they had very similar dysfunctional personalities. Resentment fueled both their violent fantasies. Hitler resented the fact that he had been denied admisssion to Munich's prestigious art school twice. The Germans seethed with resentment at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War.

Reich wrote that sexual repression led to feelings being bottled up which eventually turned into rage and hatred. Rodger was a proto fascist. He fantasized about being dictator of the world and putting women into concentration camps watching them from a tower as they slowly died of hunger (Hunger Games redux?). He thought there was something wrong with them that they were not attracted to him but to the jock types. He would have outlawed all sexual pleasure on the grounds that, if he couldn't have it, nobody else would have it either. Finally, both Hitler and Rodger fantasized and carried out a Gotterdammerung of total destruction of themselves and the world around them. Fortunately, in both cases the havoc they wreaked was considerably less than the havoc they envisioned.

May 16, 2014

Is America in the twilight zone of culturally and socially collapsing? Morris Berman, a much recognized and, yes, controversial, social critic and cultural historian, thought so tenyears ago when he wrote the notable and much criticized book, “The Twilight of American Culture.” Another blunt critique of our culture followed in one his recent books, “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire”

In “The Twilight of American Culture,” Morris Berman focused on America’s cultural breakdown as reflected in the growing alienation, inequities, pervasive anti-intellectualism, illiteracy, and decline in educational quality .

He drew anecdotal similarities of the sad state of American society to the social class differences and anti-intellectualism of the Roman Empire before its fall. Berman prophetically predicted back in 2000 that America was moving in a direction best described as a culturally mind-numbing lack ofcritical thinking … a societal consciousness and identity drowning in divisive, mean-spirited dialogue, and lost in a purposeless, paranoid excessive commercialism. He saw American culture as, quite simply, in a mess going into the 21st century… which most Americans openly or subconsciously feel today.

Berman warned we are moving in the direction of no longer having a history, a life, a consciousness apart from the business culture. The latter is putting itself beyond our power of imagining because it has become our imagination, it has become our power to envision, and describe, and theorize, and resist, and share. Hype and life have merged in politics, in the media, in computers and Internet, in our general lifestyle. This process corrupts and destroys the values lying at the core of any civilization, ours being no exception – namely, the ability to distinguish between quality and garbage, the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the commitment to critical thinking, the fostering of an equitable playing field and sharing in society’s progress.

Instead, where are we now? We are truly a divided “winner-takes-all” society, incapable of communicating and acting together in the best interests of ALL citizens. Political parties and leaders are ideologically frozen, unable to bring the balanced, unvarnished, non-dogmatized news of what needs to be done to come out of our systemic cultural and economic decline. Ten years ago Berman vividly saw the seeds of this self-destruction.

But what really perked my interest in his book was his synopsis and connection of the eerie parallels of our cultural mess to civilizations in decline. Berman described four factors present when a civilization is collapsing or near the parameters of collapsing:

Accelerating social and economic inequality which is structural in nature based on a core of industrially and technically elite regions (class divides) versus a periphery of exploited regions (class divides), resulting in a broad social and economic stratification.

Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socio-economic problems. For example, short of privatiza- tion, entitlement systems (e.g., Social Security, Medicare) become unsustainable due to the increased aging of society and a sharply falling fertility rate.

Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, self-critique, and general intellectual awareness. For example, there is the “dumbingdown” of the public school educational system where teachers effectively become baby sitters. There is the commercialization of education where the university culture is ever more devoted to consumption, entertainment or pleasing the student. A general educational mediocrity and a hostility to intelligence emerges – evidenced in my recent summary of the shockingly poor U.S. results in the international PISA TESTS for 15 year-olds.

Spiritual death – the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing or repackaging of it in formulas – kitsch, in short. The pervasiveness of kitsch, or hype, form part of a spiritual death due to the commercial domination of our lives. Hype is life. Commercial messages fill practically all the empty spaces in our culture. This works against depth and self-reflection. It leads to an inability to think except by slogans. When that part of the mind seeking to maintain adult behavior, social norms, and standards collapses and adolescent attitudes and corporate values merge, life becomes merely a question of what is popular.

These were four pretty penetrating perceptions by Morris Berman made ten years ago. While Berman is acerbically blunt about America’s societal dysfunctions, his four observations portending a culturally collapsing society ring loud and clear today. For today, a deeply rooted cynicism and distrust greets attempts by anyone in the governing establishment to come together effectively to solve critical problems. Not surprisingly, Obama’s overtures to Republicans from the very start have been met with cynicism and cut-throat politics to block his every initiative and thus insure his eventual political demise. This ugly cynicism and divisive disrespect in turn has led to total paralyzed governance … a do-nothing, band-aid policy making sickness I call compromised compromising. Obama’s approved private (vs. public option) health care plan is an example of this. A plan Republicans can’t wait to throw out if they should win the presidency in 2012.

I believe most Americans – conservatives, liberals, progressives – are sickened by the money and might decides/the winner-takes-all/the middle-class consume, consumewith stagnant wages … acorrupt perversion of American politics, economy, and culture. A culture where stigmatization, purist ideology, self-righteousness, and ridiculously dumb demagogy is the reigning religion. We deserve leaders who appeal to our saner, better instincts of balanced civil discourse and reasoned argumentation of options where people cohere for common purposes and recognition, as well as for accumulation of wealth. The problems are simply too complex to be resolved through the narrow, self-interested prism of one ideological philosophy. A demagogic rivalry of name calling, ball-faced repetitive lying to the public, passing a litmus test of who’s the most thoroughbred conservative, who’s the most genuine protector of our constitutional rights, individual freedoms and liberties has made an arrogant, farcical, running mockery of our democratic system.

In the words of political scientist and historian, Francis Fukuyama:

“All human beings believe they have a certain inherent worth and dignity. When that worth is not recognized adequately by others, they feel anger; when they do not live up to others’ evaluation, they feel shame; and when they are evaluated (and compensated) appropriately, they feel pride. If we understand, then, that economic life is pursued not simply for the sake of accumulating the greatest number of material goods possible but also for the sake of recognition (and respect), then the critical interdependence of capitalism and liberal democracy becomes clearer.”

Morris Berman’s vituperative critique of the American Way is right on when he implies we have lost the way in balancing social capital needs with a dynamic, prosperous capitalist economy. European countries are far more advanced in recognizing the inherent interdependence of social capital and commercial capital (e.g., “We are all in this life together”)for achieving a stable democracy and a solid measure of cultural cohesiveness.

BUT WE AMERICANS HAVE LOST THE WAY. And in the process we are facilitating, as Berman writes, the breakdown of our culture and egalitarian democratic principles … including an economic justice that recognizes the worker’s labor for its true worth in relation to others. Thus, creative and pragmatic governance in the public’s general interest is sacrificed to greedy, powerful special interests operating globally for maximum corporate profit and shareholder wealth … where workers are readily reduced to dispensable inputs in the race against the machine and maximization of shareholder returns.

This all means ordinary people in the middle are losing; the politics of money influence for the few is winning. The art of balanced fiscal sanity combined with sustainable investments to bring jobs back is lost to purist polarizing “government is theproblem” ideology,” and “take our country back” anti-government, cultist demagoguery.

This is deadening and dumbing down the best and brightest ideas for fundamentally and equitably curing our systemic social-economic ills … casting credibility to Berman’s “Dark Ages” prognosis that America is on a path of duplicating ROME’s cultural collapse.

March 14, 2012

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

People walk to work outside the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York in 2010. (AP/Mark Lennihan)

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

March 12, 2012

If ten or twelve Hungarian writers had been shot at the right moment, there would have been no revolt.

— Nikita Khruschev, 1956

It’s disappointing to hear people (liberals, progressives, Democrats) dismiss Rush Limbaugh as simply a “clown,” or a “blowhard,” or “an idiot,” or, more thoughtfully, as “a political entertainer and not a political pundit,” as if his 14-15 million reported regular listeners didn’t count for anything—as if they didn’t vote or make political contributions. Let’s not kid ourselves. Limbaugh’s audience doesn’t regard him as a joke. They regard him as a modern day prophet.

As shamelessly full of smears, half-truths, bogus statistics, and outright lies as his radio show is, his listeners pay closer attention and give more credence to what Limbaugh says on the air than to what they read or hear in the so-called “liberal media,” and, sad to say, to what they see printed in textbooks and encyclopedias. The man has enormous influence.

And if you don’t think 14-15 million regular listeners is a significant audience, just look at what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the total number of labor union members in the U.S. to be. As of 2011, it’s 14.8 million. Those are Limbaugh numbers.

In 1993, my union had its own “Limbaugh moment.” I was in my fourth one-year term as president of the local—still fairly popular with the troops, still tight with the shop steward corps—but winning re-election each time by increasingly smaller margins. At the end of one of our regular monthly meetings, a member approached me and asked why we were serving Snapple (along with beer and assorted soft drinks) as one of our refreshments.

He informed me that Snapple was a major sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. While I was familiar with Limbaugh’s brand of politics and rhetoric, I rarely listened to him, so I had no idea who sponsored the show. This member argued persuasively that, in the name of American trade unionism, we needed to discontinue serving Snapple at union meetings. It didn’t take much to convince me. I heartily agreed.

For anyone unfamiliar with Limbaugh’s views on organized labor, switch to April of 2010, following the Massey (West Virginia) coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners. Limbaugh went on the air and, with those punishing baritone pipes, shrilly and self-righteously railed against the UMW (United Mine Workers), accusing the union of not having done enough to prevent this terrible disaster. His remarks were sarcastic and bullying….typical Limbaugh.

But he was dead wrong. Not only was Massey a non-union facility (having aggressively rebuffed numerous UMW efforts to organize it), it’s an undeniable fact that unionized coal and copper mines have much better safety records than non-union mines. Safety costs money, and non-union facilities are unwilling to spend it. His remarks were both stupid and incendiary. Again, typical Limbaugh.

To my surprise and disappointment, the plan to do away with Snapple ran into a couple of problems. The first of which was the 9-person union Executive Board. When word got out to the Board that—without so much as an informal vote, or a consultation, or even a courtesy heads-up—I had taken it upon myself to instruct the master-at-arms (the E-Board officer in charge of refreshments) to immediately discontinue purchasing Snapple, three E-board members jumped me.

One of them (“Linda”) objected because she herself turned out to be a regular Limbaugh listener. This blew my mind. Linda was smart and funny and an extremely credible and effective union officer. Call me prejudiced, but her being a Limbaugh fan made no sense. Linda told me that she listened to Rush because she “wanted to keep an open mind” (implying that I was “close-minded”?) and because he was “honest” and “not afraid to tell the truth.”

Even though Linda and I had always gotten along well as Board members, she was furious that I’d let my own personal politics dictate union policy, and outraged that I would dare pull a stunt like this unilaterally. She made it clear that she felt betrayed. The other two E-Board members objected for lesser reasons. Apparently, they simply liked Snapple (particularly the grape flavor) and didn’t want to see it go away—not for something as trivial as sponsoring some crackpot radio show.

Things got more complicated when word was leaked to the factory floor (by Linda, I suspect), and the membership began a lively and undisciplined discussion of the issue. Not to denigrate the virtues of old-fashioned grass-roots involvement, but from a union officer’s practical point of view, this kind of “spontaneous democracy” is always scary. As it happened, there were a number of union members who listened to Limbaugh’s show, largely for the same reasons Linda did. Those members instantly mobilized. The Great Snapple War began.

A petition was immediately circulated, demanding that the union continue serving Snapple at monthly meetings. But the necessary ground-swell interest simply wasn’t there. Not only were the pro-Snapple crusaders unable to get the minimum number of required signatures on the petition, they either didn’t know how or were unwilling to make a formal motion at a membership meeting. Within three or four days, the issue was dead. And that’s how we eliminated Snapple.

One wonders what the political landscape would look like without Limbaugh. Arguably, with fourteen million people needing to find another braying jackass to serve as their mentor, his absence would have a salutary effect. But Limbaugh ain’t going anywhere. All this fuss about sponsors jumping ship is misleading. With 14-15 million potential consumers waiting to preached to, there will always be advertisers.

When it comes to advertisers avoiding controversial shows, it’s not just Rush From today’s TRI Newsletter: Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments.” The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway). As you’ll see in the note below, those “environments” go beyond the Rush Limbaugh show

“To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory...They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).’

This helps explain why, on Rush Limbaugh’s flagship station WABC, almost of the commercial breaks were filled with unpaid pubic service announcements. You can check out the list of the 50 advertisers who were known to have dropped Limbaugh before this report here.

But it’s not just Limbaugh that these advertisers want to disassociate with, but other big names in right-wing radio too. As the Daily Beast’s John Avalon notes, this is unprecedented in the 20-plus years that Limbaugh and his imitators have been on the air and could spell real trouble for an industry that’s already suffering demographically. Women ages 24–55 are the prize advertising demographic, but Limbaugh and other conservative hosts have steadily alienated these listeners over the years, so the sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke were “a perfect storm.”

The advertising flight is reminiscent of Glenn Beck’s Fox News program. After major companies refused to advertise on Beck’s show in light of racially insensitive comments, he was left with just fringe businesses like survival seed banks and gold sellers. Not long thereafter, he left Fox, reportedly under pressure.

July 16, 2011

In his book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," Chris Hedges has a whole chapter on pornography, "The Illusion of Love". The title of this blog is taken from a quote from Andrea Dworkin which Hedges uses as a lead-in to the chapter. Recently, Michelle Bachmann has garnered some media notice for signing a pledge put out by the FAMiLY LEADER, an Iowa conservative group, to rid the country of pornography among other things. The pledge has gained notoriety for a phrase suggesting that African-American families were better off during slavery than they are today. But there is little discussion of the substance of the pledge including its stance on pornography (as usual the media is only interested in the most sensationalized aspects of reality). Bachmann, whom many have characterized as a right wing nut case, has championed Christian conservative family values including the definition of marriage as being "between a man and a woman." Irregardless, the Left has been mute regarding pornography which suggests that it adopts the "live and let live" attitude it has about homosexuality and marriage and the family in general which is really a libertarian attitude. After reading Chris Hedges' chapter on pornography, the Left might reconsider this stance at least with regard to pornography. What Hedges has to say is truly shocking and the faint of heart might consider discontinuing reading this blog right here.

Suffice it to say that pornography has gone mainstream. According to Hedges:

There are some 13,000 porn films made every year in the United States, most in the San Fernando Valley in California. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $10 billion or higher. There is no precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors owns DIRECTV, which distributes more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are currently the biggest American companies accommodating porn users with the Hot Network, Adult Pay Per View, and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers.

And Obama thought he was saving the American auto industry! Instead he saved one of America's largest porn purveyors! The mainstreaming of porn has openly flouted obscenity laws which like other regulatory laws have been largely missing in action. According to the website HULIQ, "According to Miller v. California (1973), the "Miller Test" became a Supreme Court-sanctioned ruling that set up a three-part array in which "community standards" could be used to determine whether or not an item was pornographic, obscene, and of no redeeming value. This allowed communities and regions to set their own obscenity standards, which is in keeping with Tea Party standards (as a federal law banning pornography would not)." So where are the community standards especially in the red Tea Party states that would ban pornography? Or is it OK because there's a lot of money in it? So what's the problem with the mainstreaming of pornography? It's innocuous adult entertainment, isn't it? Hardly. According to Hedges, "The largest users of Internet porn are between the ages of twelve and seventeen. And porn producers increasingly target adolescents." I've even heard this demographic referred to as "children"! "The age demographic has moved downwards, especially in the UK and Europe," explained Steve Honest, the European director of production for Bluebird Films. "Porn is the new rock and roll. Young people and women are embracing porn and making purchases. Porn targets the mid-teens to the mid-twenties and up."

Hedges interviewed porn star Patrice Roldan who has starred in nearly two hundred films including Lord of Asses, Anal Girls Next Door, Monster Cock Fuckfest 9, Deep Throat Anal, Trophy Whores, and Young Dumb & Covered in Cum. Roldan made good money in the porn industry so to say that these girls who entered the industry voluntarily were exploited is not wholly accurate. In addition to the money they made filming, they could go on "dates" with their fans who they met at the annual Las Vegas porn convention at $3000 -$5000 a pop and up. Some made great money as hotel-bound prostitutes. Just imagine if you could have met Marilyn Monroe or Lana Turner or Sophia Loren at an annual convention and "dated" them! But in those days movie stars couldn't even sleep together onscreen in the same bed much less "date" their adoring fans. But that's de rigeur in the porn film world. Tres ordinaire et normale. After Roldan's first film, she was handed $600. and contracted gonnorhea. Hedges again: "She began, once she had treated her gonnorhea, to do films three or four times a month. She would have several more bouts with gonnorhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during her career. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The demands on her began to escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became 'extremely rough.' They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll."

"The next day my whole body would ache," she recalls. "It happened a lot, the aching. It used to be that only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace, would once do things like anal. Now it is expected." And this is how our teen-agers are learning about love, sex and relationships?! This is how they are developing their concept of how to treat a woman!

The physical pain and numerous surgeries to repair torn vaginas and anal tissues lead most porn stars to use excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol to deal with the pain and the emptiness of their emotional lives. Most end up being junkies and alcoholics. Hedges again: "Roldan would endure numerous anal penetrations by various men in a shoot, most of them 'super-rough.' She would have one man in her anus and one in her vagina while she gave a blow job to a third man. The men would ejaculate on her face. She was repeatedly "face-fucked,' with men forcing their cocks violently in and out of her mouth. She did what in industry shorthand is called 'ATM,' ass-to-mouth, where a man pulls his penis from her anus and puts it directly in her mouth." She explained that she washed herself good so this didn't bother her too much except when the man pulled his penis from another girl's ass and put it in her mouth because she didn't know about the other girl's standards of cleanliness!

"What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?," Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity asks. "What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason that porn is so difficult to discuss is not that it is about sex - our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty are played out. And men - maybe a majority of men - like it."

As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.

Why would the Left cede this family values issue to the likes of Michelle Bachmann? Surely a libertarian attitude towards pornography acquiesces in the mainstreaming of pornography and the profits accumulated by large "respectable" US corporations like GM and AT&T. It also acquiesces in the purveying of pornography to young adolescent males who make up a large share of the audience and the attitudes that are being formed by exposure to such trash. American culture has gone in a few short years from one that was overly puritanical to one that is awash in degradation, obscenity and debauchery by anyone's definition. The sexual liberation of the 1960s, initially a salubrious renunciation of repression, has been thoroughly exploited and degraded by the commercialized pornography industry of the 2000s. It is the culture of the Roman Empire before its fall, of Caligua and Nero, a culture of debasement and depravity. Surely, it should not be left to the likes of Michelle Bachmann to point this out. While I don't agree with her on her stance against homosexuality or the definition of marriage, I do heartily endorse the fact that she purportedly is taking a stand against pornography. The American culture is so hypocritical that it outlaws legalized prostitution but mainlines pornography. I think legalized prostitution might serve an actual purpose for those who cannot find satisfaction in a normal relationship with a woman, but pornography is not helpful in formulating salubrious attitudes between the sexes nor is it protective of women who enter the industry despite the fact that they are paid well and do so voluntarily. When a "live and let live" libertarian attitude results in the degradation of a class of women and results in unhealthy attitudes towards sex, it should be prohibited while encouraging healthful relationships, not necessarily, but including, marriage.

July 10, 2011

New audio of statements by the prominent Iowa social-conservative group THE FAMiLY LEADER suggests the group believes essentially all pornography is illegal. Moreover, they are seeking commitments from presidential candidates to appoint an Attorney General who would prosecute almost all pornography found online or in stores.

This week, THE FAMiLY LEADER introduced a pledge intended to protect traditional marriage which quickly attracted the signatures of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. ThinkProgress, ABC, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Slate and many other outlets interpreted the broad language in the pledge as advocating a ban on pornography.

This week, THE FAMiLY LEADER introduced a pledge intended to protect traditional marriage which quickly attracted the signatures of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. ThinkProgress, ABC, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Slate and many other outlets interpreted the broad language in the pledge as advocating a ban on pornography.

But that’s not, however, what he said at the press conference on Thursday when he unveiled the pledge.

Certainly the U.S. Supreme Court has delineated what is prosecutable and even with the Ashcroft Department of Justice, and certainly then more so with Holder Department of Justice we have not had illegal pornography prosecuted. So we expect the executive to appoint an Attorney General who will vigorously prosecute all illegal pornography.

You can listen to the audio, starting at 17:29, here. There are two main points: 1. We need to “vigorously prosecute all illegal pornography,” and 2. The scope of the prosecutions under Ashcroft were not aggressive or expansive enough.

Lam Nguyen’s job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other “computer forensic specialists” like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department’s operation to rid the world of porn.

In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs…or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.

The Justice Department hired Bruce Taylor to take the lead in developing and prosecuting many of the cases:

The Justice Department recently hired Bruce Taylor, who was instrumental in a handful of convictions obtained over the past year and unsuccessfully represented the state in a 1981 case, Larry Flynt vs. Ohio…

“Just about everything on the Internet and almost everything in the video stores and everything in the adult bookstores is still prosecutable illegal obscenity,” [Taylor] said.

“…Once it becomes obvious that this really is a federal felony instead of just a form of entertainment or investment, then legitimate companies, to stay legitimate, are going to have to distance themselves from it.”

THE FAMiLY LEADER believes that this interpretation of obscenity law — which deems essentially all pornography found online or in adult book and video stores illegal — is insufficiently expansive and aggressive. Vander Plaats also emphasizes that every instance of obscenity under their interpretation needs to be vigorously prosecuted. According to Vander Plaats those who sign the pledge, like Michele Bachmann, agree to appoint an Attorney General who will make sure these prosecutions happen.

January 31, 2011

Is America in the twilight zone of cultural and social collapse? Morris Berman, a much recognized and, yes, controversial, social critic and cultural historian, thought so tenyears ago when he wrote the notable and much criticized book, “The Twilight ofAmerican Culture.” Another tongue-lashing excoriation of our culture followed in one his recent books, “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire”

In “The Twilight of American Culture,” Berman focused on America’s cultural breakdown as reflected in the growing alienation, inequities, pervasive anti-intellectualism, illiteracy, and decline in educational quality .

He drew anecdotal similarities of the sad state of American society to the social class differences and anti-intellectualism of the Roman Empire before its fall. Berman prophetically predicted back in 2000 that America was moving in a direction best described as a culturally mind-numbing lack ofcritical thinking … a societal consciousness and identity drowning in divisive, mean-spirited dialogue, and lost in a purposeless, paranoid excessive commercialism. He saw American culture as, quite simply, in a mess going into the 21st century.

Berman warned we are moving in the direction of no longer having a history, a life, a consciousness apart from the business culture. The latter is putting itself beyond our power of imagining because it has become our imagination, it has become our power to envision, and describe, and theorize, and resist, and share. Hype and life have merged in politics, in the media, in computers and the Internet, in our general lifestyle. This process destroys the values lying at the core of any civilization, ours being no exception – namely, the ability to distinquish between quality and garbage, the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the committment to critical thinking, the fostering of an equitable playing field and sharing in society’s progress.

Instead, where are we now? We are truly a divided society, incapable of communicating and acting together in the best interests of all citizens. Political parties and leaders are ideologically frozen, unable to bring the balanced, unvarnished, undogmatized news of what needs to be done to come out of our systemic cultural and economic decline. Ten years ago Berman vividly saw the seeds of this self-destruction.

But what really piqued my interest in his book was his synopsis and connection of the eerie parallels of our cultural mess to civilizations in decline. Berman described four factors present when a civilization is collapsing or near the parameters of collapse:

Accelerating social and economic inequality which is structural in nature based on a core of industrial and technical elite regions (class divides) versus a periphery of exploited regions (class divides) resulting in a broad social and economic stratification.

Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socio-economic problems. For example, short of privatization, entitlement systems (e.g., Social Security, Medicare) become unsustainable due to the increased aging of society and a sharply falling fertility rate.

Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, self-critique, and general intellectual awareness. For example, there is the dumbing down of the public school educational system where teachers effectively become baby sitters. There is the commercialization of education where the university culture is ever more devoted to consumption, entertainment or pleasing the student. A general educational mediocritizing and a hostility to intelligence emerges – evidenced in my recent summary of the shockingly poor U.S. results in the international PISA TESTS for 15 years olds.

Spiritual death – the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing or repackaging of it in formulas – kitsch, in short. The pervasiveness of kitsch, or hype, form part of a spiritual death due to the commercial domination of our lives. Hype is life. Commercial messages fill practically all the empty spaces in our culture. This works against depth and self-reflection. It leads to an inability to think except by slogans. When that part of the mind seeking to maintain adult behavior, social norms, and standards collapses and adolescent attitudes and corporate values merge, life becomes merely a question of what is popular.

These were four very penetrating perceptions by Morris Berman made ten years ago. Admittedly, Berman tends to generalize and rage acerbic about America’s societal dysfunctions. However, his four observations portending a culturally collapsing society ring loud and clear today. For today, a deeply rooted cynicism and distrust greets attempts by anyone in the governing establishment to come together effectively to solve critical problems. Not surprisingly, Obama’s overtures to Republicans and the business world have immediately been met with accusations of gross naivete andcourting the devil (e.g., appointing GE’s CEO as the head of a team to spur U.S. job growth). This cynicism and absence of civility in turn contributes to paralyzed governance … a do-nothing-band-aid policy-making contamination I call compromised compromising. The recently approved health care plan is an example of this.

I believe most Americans – conservatives, liberals, progressives – are sickened by the money and might decides/the winner-takes-all/consume, consume . middle class with stagnant wages, corrupted perversion of American politics, economy, and culture. A culture where stigmatization, ideologically pure self-rightousness, and ridiculously dumb demagoguery is the reigning religion. We deserve leaders who appeal to our saner, better instincts of balanced civil discourse and reasoned argumentation of options which allows people to coalesce around common purposes and recognition as well as for accumulation of wealth. The problems are simply too complex to be resolved through the narrow, self-interested prism of one ideological philosophy. A demogogic rivalry of name calling, bald-faced repetitive lying to the public, passing a litmus test of who’s the most thoroughbred conservative, who’s the most genuine protector of our constitutional rights, individual freedoms and liberties has made an arrogant, farcical, running mockery of our democratic system.

“All human beings believe they have a certain inherent worth and dignity. When that worth is not recognized adequately by others, they feel anger; when they do not live up to others’ evaluation, they feel shame; and when they are evaluated (and compensated) appropriately, they feel pride. If we understand, then, that economic life is pursued not simply for the sake of accumulating the greatest number of material goods possible but also for the sake of recognition (and respect), then the critical interdependence of capitalism and liberal democracy becomes clearer.”

Morris Berman’s vituperative critique of the American Way, while out of bounds here and there, is right on when he implies we have lost the way in balancing social capital with a dynamic, prosperous capitalist economy. Europe is far more advanced in recognizing the inherent interdependence here of social capital and commercial capital (e.g., “We are all in this life together”) for achieving a stable democracy and a solid measure of cultural cohesiveness.

BUT WE HAVE LOST THE WAY. And in the process we are facilitating, as Berman writes, the breakdown of our culture and egalitarian democractic principles … including an economic justice that recognizes the worker’s labor for its true worth in relation to others. Thus, creative and pragmatic goverance in the public’s general interest is sacrificed to greedy, powerful special interests operating globally for maximum corporate profit and shareholder wealth.

This all means ordinary people are losing, the politics of money is winning, and the art of fiscal sanity while bringing jobs back is being buried in political-economic obfuscation that brings credibility to Berman’s “dark”prognosis of America’s inevitable duplication of ROME’s cultural collapse.

January 20, 2011

Editor: This contribution by Rocky Neptun is a continuation of the debate about a new football stadium in downtown San Diego, begun by Andy Cohen here.

When I began my property maintenance business a few decades ago, I used 80 percent of my assets and borrowed an amount equivalent to another 50 percent. At that time, or even now, there was never a consideration that you, as a taxpayer, should finance my business venture.

Yet, Alexander Spanos, worth over one and half billion dollars, according to Forbes Magazine, wants you and me to subsidize his new football stadium in the East Village, downtown San Diego. The entire notion of corporate welfare for his project and the millionaire fat assed football players who smash and crash against one another chasing a stupid looking ball, would bring laughs in any enlightened social order. Yet, in our society, where single-mothers, without work or funds, are harangued and fingerprinted, treated like criminals for asking for a helping hand, the Mayor of San Diego, the city’s main major newspaper and other bought shrills would have us spend $800 million on an oversized playpen for aging adolescents who just can’t seem to get it up for cable television or internet broadcasts of this tedious brawling, called football.

Alex Spanos.

This titan of sports events would have you believe that his million dollar profit each night will bring jobs and prosperity to the region. Shades of a roman emperor, he would give us bread and circuses. Like any con artist, sovereign or not, with the precise skill of a pickpocket , the secret is to let your victim think that everything is normal, that this is the way things are done. If one’s prey is a large group of people, then, in Orwellian fashion, all the gears and levers of the corporate state, its media, politicians, advertisers, snake oil salesmen, must be put into motion to dupe the citizens into believing the lie. From weapons of mass destruction to the financial benefits of a football stadium, the process of propaganda and untruth is the same; begin with a false premise, repeat it over and over, spend a few million plastering the message on walls and between segments of Oprah Winfrey, narrow the parameters of the debate by a bought media and its cowed journalists.

Right up front, one thing must be made perfectly clear – there has never been a sports stadium which has made money using taxpayer dollars – except Miller Park Stadium in Milwaukee which is not only a multi-use facility of football and baseball, but its Green Bay Packers football team is a community owned franchise, with all profit being returned to the neighborhoods.

Football is all about money, lots of money for owners and the players. Those who cling to this wealth, like barnacles on a whale, or those who feel their macho manhood (and, increasingly, macha womanhood) is tied into a symbiotic relationship with a home team, will try to tell you that stadiums bring jobs and spending to the community.

“Wealthy sports moguls have turned bilking taxpayers into an art form,” Doug Bandow, conservative senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former assistant to President Ronald Reagan, reminds us. “Franchise owners typically win taxpayer support only through threats; pay us off, or we will leave they say, give us a new stadium, or we will go someplace else.”

“Government stadiums benefit economic and political elites,” Bandow reports. He cites a study done by two economists, Robert Baade of Lake Forest college and Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago, who looked at 10 metropolitan areas which built stadiums and found “no net employment increase.” The study pointed out that, except for the initial construction jobs, most of which were specialists brought in from other parts of the country, the remaining jobs were low-wage, mostly part-time and lacked benefits.

Also, in terms of stadium advocacy about boosts to the local economy through new revenue “which will offset the taxes used to subsidize the new stadium,” they found that no new out-of-town attendees are attracted by a new stadium with more than 90 percent of ticket buyers local residents and that sports spending primarily substitutes for other outlays.

“Most people have entertainment budgets, and the $100 they spend taking the family to the ballgame is $100 that they don’t spend on movies or bowling later in the month,” the report said, “but nobody seriously thinks that we should raise taxes or spend millions on bowling alley or movie theatre subsidies.” This is called the substitution effect which smashes the economic multiplier effect claimed by most stadium proponents.

“stadiums don’t constitute a great unmet social need, sports should be a private enterprise, privately funded.” Suggesting a far greater pull for suburban residents, he called for a string of public restaurants or “if the goal is trickle-down consumer spending and business development, why not build a new automobile factory, retail outlet, grocery store or software facility to attract and maintain companies, jobs and economic growth?”

The real reason that Spanos wants a new football stadium is not community stature or more jobs or an economic benefit for you and me, it’s because he wants more elegant skyboxes than Qualcomm has. These imperial balconies can rent for as much as $250,000 a year and, better yet, for Spanos, unlike entrance fees, he doesn’t have to be split skybox income with the National Football League.

Also, like Wal-Mart and other low-wage exploiters, who get the public to subsidize the working poor with food stamps, health care and other essential needs, public dollars underwriting stadiums help Spanos absorb the inflated payroll of millionaire football players. The city of San Diego already loses $17 million a year subsidizing Qualcomm Stadium, does anyone really think that will change with a much more expensive location, not only in terms of land costs but in day-to-day traffic delays and police outlays.

Then there are the additional unseen costs of subsidizing a billionaire’s expanding fortune. There is the obvious fact that bond money spent on a new stadium could go for much more vital infrastructure needs which serve the greater citizenry, like aging sewer lines which spew into city streets and the ocean, streets, libraries, parks, or affordable housing. Just one year after Minneapolis’ Minnesota Twins got a new stadium in 2007, the city’s I-35 bridge collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring over a hundred, because repairs were delayed for lack of funds.

There is also the issue of using tax-exempt bonds to finance private ventures, like stadiums. Not only will San Diego pay a much higher rate on the municipal bond loan because of its structural deficit and bad credit rating, but because of the tax exemption on the bond the state of California and the Federal Government, reeling from the economic downtown, will lose millions in tax revenue from the Spanos family which will have to be made-up by either increased taxes or the loss of essential government services.

For every $100 million in tax exempt bonds issued, the Federal government loses $21 million in tax revenue, so, tax payers – you and me – would have to help make up the $100 million or so loss during the life of the bond. So San Diegans will get a double-whammy, while Alexander Spanos sings his way to the bank.

Now for almost a decade the Chargers have said they would build a new stadium without public money, yet recently they have said they cannot do it without corporate welfare. Why the change, especially in the middle of a recession? Could it be that it took that long for their people to be embedded in the redevelopment agency, CCDC, and city staff? Why did Mayor Sanders, who as a campaign promise, said no city money would be used for a stadium, suddenly do an about face and now parrots the notion? Could there be a consulting position in the works? Why has CCDC spent close to $200,000 and the San Diego City Council another $500,000 of public money to study how to finance the construction when Spanos should have paid for these studies? Are there bribes, kick-backs and/or campaign contributions in the mix? And how many millions will Spanos spend on distortions and lies in the upcoming referendum over the stadium?

“Corporate welfare is always unsavory business,” Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee says, “the politically connected and high profile gain at the expense of small business owners and consumers who work hard day to day but have no friends in high places, decision making is shifted from the private sector, which is guided by price and profit signals to meet and create consumer demand, to the public sector, which is guided by politics and the quest for power, taxes are increased on the many, so that resources can be funneled to a select few – in the case of subsidized ballparks, billionaire team owners and multi-millionaire team players.”

In his book, The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, J.C.Bradbury documents that there is absolutely no public economic development benefit to new stadiums. While Michael W. Lynch of the Conservative blog, Reason.com, bluntly tells it like it is:

“publicly funded sports stadiums are like crack cocaine to local politicians and business bigwigs,” he writes, “these folks are just like addicts, they deceive everyone around them for the sake of a fix, they resort to public theft to pay for their fix, forcing citizens who couldn’t care less about sports to subsidize teams.”

Rocky Neptun, who has never lasted through a full football or baseball game in his long life, is a soccer fan. He is the volunteer director of the San Diego Renters Union (www.SanDiegoRentersUnion.org)

December 31, 2010

Despite the end-of-the-year upturn with Congressional ratification of the START Treaty and repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the United States remains stuck in a quagmire that has paralyzed our politics for 30 years. While the Republican party holds our government hostage, Democrats typically collaborate in public policies that don't have a prayer of resolving the deeply serious problem we face.

Though Americans younger than about 40 have never experienced it, there was a time when government was seen as a vehicle the American people could use to resolve pressing societal problems. When government failed to address the needs of relatively powerless groups, it was possible for them to mobilize around their grievances and place them on the public's agenda.

No longer. Today, protest has become routinized and all-but-impotent. Or, like the Tea Party, it has been coopted by the agenda of wealthy conservatives.

The dominant political message beamed at younger Americans for the past 30 years is that government is the problem, the market is the solution, and the United States must rely on aggressive military intervention to defend "our" interests.

And so, when the Democrats pledge to end the tax cuts enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans, the Republicans cry "class warfare," and the Democrats cave. With former Senator Alan Simpson gleefully anticipating the budgetary "blood bath" this coming spring when Congress has to raise the ceiling on national debt, we'll see more of the same. Social Security looms as perhaps the likely next target.

If we are to escape this quagmire, it is important to understand how we got into this mess and why we have lost the sense that we as a people can solve our problems and determine our future.

The crucial turning point occurred with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan's policies were anticipated in earlier pronouncements by then corporate attorney Lewis Powell and the Trilateral Commission who blamed America's economic woes of the 1970s on the "democratic excess" of the 1960s -most notably the entry of new populations -racial minorities, women, and the young- into an increasingly agitated political process. Both Powell in 1971 and the Trilateralists in 1975 called for a concerted effort to shift American public opinion to the Right, while turning politics over to the market.

Reagan's electoral success stemmed from his ability to appeal through folksy rhetoric to voting majorities while simultaneously producing the market friendly policies corporate America desired. Thus he appealed to time-honored "family values" that allegedly prevailed in a simpler, if mythical, United States before the era of "riots, assassinations, and domestic strife over the Vietnam war," as he characterized the 1960s.

By tapping into the very real grievances of Americans who felt they were losing ground in the 1970s, Reagan created the key to the Right's electoral success ever since: a pseudo-populism that blamed the "strife" of the 1960s on an allegedly liberal elite: liberal Big Government, liberal university administrators, and the "liberal" media who paid attention to the strife. Pseudo populism drew crucial populations who felt aggrieved by 60s era movements -notably the white South and the white working class-away from the Democratic Party. The Democrats' response was telling: a new Democratic Leadership Council was organized to move the party into the corporate-friendly center.

The political backlash against the 60s was greatly aided by the commercial media -by a narrowed range of political discourse produced by an increasingly subservient news media, and by a wide range of films (think Big Chill or Forrest Gump), television sit-coms (Reagan's favorite: Family Ties), and advertisements that either reinforced the 60s imagery played up in the conservative backlash or converted 60s social movements to stereotypes that robbed them of their political meanings relevant to today.

It would take pages to explain adequately, but I argue that during the 1960s era the very same forces -a narrow range of media interpretation and the commercial emphasis on dramatic imagery, conflict and personalities- provided an open invitation to the kinds of "strife" backlash types love to equate with something they call the "Sixties." The mass media did not consider the more system-challenging meanings and arguments of 60s-era social movements worthy of serious consideration. But they were attracted to the behavioral expressions of what they too glibly saw as a generation in revolt.

These are the same images, behaviors, and personalities -and generational frame for understanding them- that continue to provoke unending media treatments and "hip" sales pitches designed to encourage our consumption of material goods and entertainment. We are stuck with a discourse that loves to use media images to blame some "Other" for our problems.As for the now-distant 1960s era, it has been relegated to an alleged "generational debate" between those who continue to blame the 60s for our contemporary problems and those who are, perhaps, wistfully nostalgic for a more vital and hopeful time. What we have lost as a people is, first, a history whose central meaning was that even relatively powerless people can organize and achieve historic change, and second, the ability to carry on a democratic conversation with each other across the boundaries that have long been rigidified in what passes for political discourse in our mass media.

Left to its own devices, a capitalist economy extracts enormous wealth from the labor of employees and reliable access to cheap resources. The inequality capitalism produces is supposedly balanced by the one-person-one-vote equality of a political democracy. The "people" are thus empowered to rein in the excesses of capitalism through the political process. Under the neo-liberal regime, we the people have lost that power.

Ted (Edward P.) Morgan, a political science professor at Lehigh University, is the author of the newly-published What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (University Press of Kansas).

August 23, 2010

The San Diego Union has been reporting a lot on San Diego billionaire Irwin M Jacobs lately starting on August 14. He and wife Joan have singlehandedly saved a number of San Diego institutions like the Symphony and the new Central Library which, if not for their recent $20 million donation, might not even be built. Four days later he was back in the paper again celebrating the 25th anniversary of Qualcomm, the company he founded which is the source of his good fortune. Then the next day he was in the paper again unveiling a $30 million dollar parking plan for Balboa Park that would free up the park's central square and build a parking garage.

The Jacobs' have been major benefactors and philanthropists in San Diego and elsewhere donating to education at UCSD, providing funds for hospitals, radio station KSDS, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the La Jolla Playhouse, the La Jolla library, the Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma Research Foundation, the ACLU and many other arts and cultural charities too numerous to mention. The Jacobs tend to give when and where it can make a significant difference.

Recently they joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who have formed a group of billionaires dedicated to giving away half their fortunes. This is from the Telegraph.co.uk:

Mr Buffett is an extremely successful investor and one of the world's richest men, as well as one of its biggest givers to charity. Having pledged to give away 99 per cent of his estimated $47 billion fortune, much of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the so-called Sage of Omaha had wanted to get together a small group of like-minded billionaires to encourage their peers to join the ranks of what he dubbed the "Great Givers". Mr Gates, who has taken on an almost messianic role in advancing philanthropy since relinquishing the reins of Microsoft, needed no persuading to get involved.

Irwin Jacobs was present at that meeting. Probably not present at that dinner were libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. Their company Koch Industries makes $100 billion a year and they give mainly to right wing causes. They have become the major thorn in the side of President Obama's administration spending millions on lobbyists and funding think tanks like the Cato Institute (which they founded) and the Heritage Foundation and groups like Americans for Prosperity which funds the Tea Partiers. They give tons of money to academics to deny climate science and global warming while being named one of the top ten corporate polluters by University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute. An exhaustive article in the August 23 edition of the New Yorker magazine details in depth all their activities which have set much of the conservative and anti-intellectual tone that the Obama administration is having to deal with including outright lies and distortions about Obama hinself such as that he's a Muslim (believed by 20% of Americans).

Now it's all well and good that humanitarian philanthropists donate to educational institutions, hospitals, arts and cultural institutions and the like, but, if they want to have a society worth preserving, they might want to think about setting up a think tank to advocate for sane public policy. It's not even a matter of the left-right political divide so much as it's a matter of the smart-dumb cultural divide. The Koch brothers are on a crusade to dumb down America. Their theory is that, if a lie is repeated often enough and enough people come to believe it, then they have effectively created the Truth. And I'm sure that smart guys like Irwin Jacobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't want to see American society become convinced of such lies as global warming doesn't exist when all reputable scientists have declared that it does.

Ralph Nader has written a book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Uswhich is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the message is clear. If right wing billionaires are funding think tanks, academics, lobbyists and even mass movements like the Tea Party while liberal billionaires are out doing good deeds like funding educational institutions, hospitals and museums, the field is left open to the hate mongers and spin artists who are gradually moving the American people in a rightward direction. When a larger percentage of the population believes that global warming is not real today than believed it five years ago, something is wrong. We're going in the wrong direction. People are being uneducated, made dumber, despite the best efforts of educational institutions. An untruth is winning out over the truth. Science is being denigrated and think tanks are generating falsehoods.

Interestingly, enough both Irwin Jacobs and the Koch brothers graduated from MIT. They both narrowly escaped death in a plane accident, Jacobs by not going on a trade mission to Croatia with Ron Brown at the last minute and Koch being the only first class survivor of an actual plane wreck in LA. Other than that they don't have much in common. Jacobs is a Democrat who had a fundraiser for Barack Obama and supported Clinton and John F Kennedy.

Warren Buffett has made the public comment that he doesn't think it's fair that he pays taxes at a 15% rate while his secretary pays at a 30% rate. Obviously, these men have good intentions. So why aren't they publicly advocating in a billion dollar way the facts that global warming is real and that billionaires should pay more taxes?

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

So there are billionaires who want to do good and there are the Koch brothers who are building a popular movement based on lies and distortions whose agenda includes undermining true educational and liberal values in the interests, well, of Koch Industries and their $100 billion a year in revenues. It's a natural to be a climate science denier if part of your corporate empire is oil. While philanthropists like Jacobs, Gates and Buffett give for the benefit of humanity, the Koch brothers' charitable interests are completely self-serving:

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

...

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”

In 2008 President Obama described the science on global warming as "beyond dispute." The Cato Institute, however, took out a full page ad in the New York Times to contradict him. They have parried Obama at every turn using their "scientists" and academics to dispute him. This has created the climate where Obama has been called every name in the book, accused of every crime, attacked at every turn no matter which way he turned. If Hillary had won, they would have done the same to her. In fact they used the same play book on Bill Clinton.

So high minded billionaires beware! While you are out there doing good deeds, your counterpart billionaires like the Koch brothers are doing their level best to move the electorate to the right, spread intolerance, denial of science and outright hatred for the values you gentlemen and ladies represent. Perhaps you should reconsider your giving, start a THINK TANK with liberal values, heed Ralph Nader's call for public advocacy and consider 'the pledge' in a new light.

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

Contrary to what rightwing American critics would have us believe, Europe has the largest economy in the world, producing nearly a third of the world's GDP.Indeed, its economy is almost as large as those of the United States and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than the United States and China put together, and Europe had a higher per capita growth rate from 1998 to 2008 than the United States. Long denigrated by US pundits as the land of high unemployment, the EU currently even has a slightly lower unemployment rate than the United States. Indeed, the World Economic Forum in 2008-09 ranked Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands among the top ten most competitive economies in the world. They are also ranked at or near the top of most lists for quality of life, health care and social benefits. That's not a coincidence, since the participation of workers on all corporate boards of directors allows for both economic vibrancy and more egalitarian social policy. And while the United States also ranks high in competitiveness, it is near the bottom among most-developed countries in health care, social benefits and quality of life.

Sweden, Germany and other European countries are proof that you can have it all -- but only if you have the right institutions to facilitate both a powerful economic engine and the supportive institutions and benefits to harness that engine and keep employees and families healthy and productive. These distinctly European advances may be the most important innovations in the world economy since the invention of the modern corporation, since they encourage free enterprise combined with economic democracy and worker consultation that does not unduly burden entrepreneurship and commerce. The advances allow businesses to be both competitive and socially responsible.

In effect, Europe has reinvented the corporation. Yet the latest critiques of capitalism by leading authors like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and the producers of the popular film The Corporation tend to view all corporations and all capitalisms as the same. American progressives, while searching for effective responses to globalization, appear to be mostly unaware of these intriguing European inventions. Movements to revoke the charters of offensive corporations, while having gut-level appeal, have failed to recognize that European corporations are fundamentally different animals from their "disaster capitalism" US counterparts.

Now, a year and a half after an economic earthquake shook the world, new economic models are beginning to find traction in America.Alternatives to Wall Street capitalism, the epicenter of the temblor, are suddenly getting a new hearing in the United States, whether it's Paul Volcker calling for reinstatement of Glass-Steagall regulation of the banking sector, the United Steelworkers announcing an alliance with the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain to develop manufacturing cooperatives in the United States, or Cleveland-based efforts to establish worker-owned co-ops in distressed communities [see Alperovitz, Howard and Williamson, "The Cleveland Model," March 1, in The Nation].

If Americans want to learn about cooperatives, Europe is a great place to start.Those co-ops produce an estimated 12% of the GDP of the European Union and involve, directly or indirectly, at least 60% of the population.Besides the Mondragon co-ops in Spain, in which 256 companies employ 100,000 people in industry, retail, finance and education, there's also Coop Italia, which operates the largest supermarket chain in Italy, employing 56,000 with more than 6 million members; housing co-ops like Poland's TUW; and the Co-operative Group in Britain, which is the world's largest consumer-owned business, with 4.5 million members.

In Europe, practices unfamiliar to Americans, such as co-determination, supervisory boards and works councils, have been crucial in helping to harness capitalism's tremendous wealth-creating capacity so that its prosperity is broadly shared.

Co-determination has several features, one of which allows workers to elect representatives to corporate boards of directors known as supervisory boards.Supervisory boards then oversee company managers, who handle day-to-day operations.In Germany, the world's second-largest exporter and fourth-largest national economy, fully half of the boards of directors of the largest corporations -- Siemens, BMW, Daimler, Deutsche Telekom and others -- are elected by workers.In Sweden, one-third of a company's directors are worker-elected.To understand the significance of this, imagine if Wal-Mart were legally required to allow its workers to elect a third to half of its board, who would then oversee the CEO.Imagine how much that would change Wal-Mart's behavior toward its workers and supply chain.It's hard for Americans even to conceive of such a notion; indeed, when I ask Americans at my lectures how many of them have heard of worker-elected supervisory boards, usually no hands go up.Yet most European nations employ some version of this as a regular feature of their economy.

Co-determination means that elected worker directors should sit side by side as equal decision-makers with stockholder representatives, supervising management, is a little-known yet unprecedented extension of democratic principle into the corporate sphere.

Research shows that employee representation on corporate supervisory boards, contrary to fears that it would cause tension or render decision-making too cumbersome, has actually fostered cooperation between management and workers.This, in turn, has benefited the businesses as well as the workers.Workers have input, even into important decisions, so companies are less plagued by labor strife and internal schisms.And workers are well compensated, with high salaries and the most generous social support systems in the world.

One study of Swedish businesses found that two-thirds of executives viewed co-determination as "very" or "rather" positive, because it contributed to a positive climate, made board decisions "deeply rooted among the employees" and facilitated implementation of "tough decisions." Eight of ten chairmen were satisfied with the arrangement and felt it was not important to reduce worker representation.An EU directive establishing a continent-wide framework for board-level employee representation went into effect in October 2004, firmly rooting supervisory boards in Europe's economic culture.

The other pillar of co-determination is known as works councils, which are just what the name implies -- elected councils at businesses, through which employees gain significant input into working conditions.Works councils, which are separate from labor unions but often populated by trade unionists, have real clout.They enjoy veto power over certain management decisions pertaining to treatment of employees, such as redeployment and dismissal.They also have "co-decision rights" to meet with management to discuss the firm's finances, work and holiday schedules, work organization and other procedures.In addition, they benefit from "consultation rights" in planning the introduction of new technologies and in mergers and layoffs, as well as in obtaining information useful in contract negotiations, such as profit and wage data.In some nations, including Germany, Sweden and France, works councils have acquired even more rights and greater influence.

German law stipulates that factory-wide workers' assemblies must be held at least four times a year, at which a management representative must report on the plant and the business.The head of the works council also reports, and workers use these assemblies to promote their views and, if necessary, criticize company decisions in front of management.

In 1994 the EU issued a pioneering directive on works councils, stipulating that every multinational with at least 1,000 workers, and at least 150 workers in two or more EU nations, must negotiate agreements with works councils.Other nations have supplemented that directive by requiring councils in every workplace.Studies by Princeton's Jonas Pontusson and others have concluded that works councils contribute to efficiency by improving communication, which in turn improves the quality of decisions and legitimizes decisions in the eyes of workers.The studies also found that works councils are associated with lower absenteeism, more worker training, better handling of grievances and smoother implementation of health and safety standards.It turns out that when workers are given a degree of consultation, it makes them more satisfied and more productive.

In Germany works councils and supervisory boards can take substantial credit for the fact that, while the US unemployment rate has more than doubled during this economic crisis, Germany's has barely increased.That's because Chancellor Angela Merkel was heavily influenced by works councils and labor unions, and by the culture of consultation in general, to adopt a policy called Kurzarbeit, or "short-time work," in which, instead of laying off millions, employees agreed to spread the pain by working shorter weeks.Most of the lost wages have been made up from a special fund squirreled away during more prosperous times.As a result, more Germans have money in their pockets, and communities and households haven't been decimated by layoffs like they have been in the United States.(Despite the advantages, when Larry Summers, one of Barack Obama's closest economic advisers, was asked why the president didn't pursue short-time work to stem the economic bleeding, he dismissed the idea, saying the White House wanted to create new jobs, not preserve old ones.)But of course there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't do both!

Co-determination has proved crucial to Europe's economic success and its broadly distributed wealth.The practical effect of co-determination is that corporate managers and executives must confer extensively with employees and unions about a range of issues, even about the future direction of the company. Co-determination reflects European "socialized capitalism," with its communitarian values, long-term strategic vision and emphasis on manufacturing, much the way huge executive bonuses, quarterly earnings and a bloated financial sector reflect America's Wall Street capitalism.Socialized capitalism has both produced and benefited from the culture of consultation, which has also contributed to the creation of cooperatives and resulted in a vibrant small-business sector that produces two-thirds of European jobs, compared with only half of US jobs.

April 24, 2010

The investment bank's cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilization – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can

by Matt Taibbi

So Goldman Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s - and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.

When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilization has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshiped even by people who've never read her books or even heard of her. The rightwing "Tea Party" movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.

Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity") that unexpectedly sparked a heated national debate. On one side of the debate were people like me, who believed that Goldman is little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.

On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealized heroes, the saviors of society.

In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and the "parasites" and "moochers" who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she refused to accept any need for economic regulation - which is a fancy way of saying we only need law enforcement for unsophisticated criminals.

Rand's fingerprints are all over the recent Goldman story. The case in question involves a hedge fund financier, John Paulson, who went to Goldman with the idea of a synthetic derivative package pegged to risky American mortgages, for use in betting against the mortgage market. Paulson would short the package, called Abacus, and Goldman would then sell the deal to suckers who would be told it was a good bet for a long investment. The SEC's contention is that Goldman committed a crime - a "failure to disclose" - when they failed to tell the suckers about the role played by the vulture betting against them on the other side of the deal.

Now, the instruments in question in this deal - collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps - fall into the category of derivatives, which are virtually unregulated in the US thanks in large part to the effort of gremlinish former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who as a young man was close to Rand and remained a staunch Randian his whole life. In the late 90s, Greenspan lobbied hard for the passage of a law that came to be called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, a monster of a bill that among other things deregulated the sort of interest-rate swaps Goldman used in its now-infamous dealings with Greece.

Both the Paulson deal and the Greece deal were examples of Goldman making millions by bending over their own business partners. In the Paulson deal the suckers were European banks such as ABN-Amro and IKB, which were never told that the stuff Goldman was cheerfully selling to them was, in effect, designed to implode; in the Greece deal, Goldman hilariously used exotic swaps to help the country mask its financial problems, then turned right around and bet against the country by shorting Greece's debt.

Now here's the really weird thing. Confronted with the evidence of public outrage over these deals, the leaders of Goldman will often appear to be genuinely confused, scratching their heads and staring quizzically into the camera like they don't know what you're upset about. It's not an act. There have been a lot of greedy financiers and banks in history, but what makes Goldman stand out is its truly bizarre cultist/religious belief in the rightness of what it does.

The point was driven home in England last year, when Goldman's international adviser, sounding exactly like a character in Atlas Shrugged, told an audience at St Paul's Cathedral that "The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest". A few weeks later, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein told the Times that he was doing "God's work".

Even if he stands to make a buck at it, even your average used-car salesman won't sell some working father a car with wobbly brakes, then buy life insurance policies on that customer and his kids. But this is done almost as a matter of routine in the financial services industry, where the attitude after the inevitable pileup would be that that family was dumb for getting into the car in the first place. Caveat emptor, dude!

People have to understand this Randian mindset is now ingrained in the American character. You have to live here to see it. There's a hatred toward "moochers" and "parasites" - the Tea Party movement, which is mainly a bunch of pissed off suburban white people whining about minorities consuming social services, describes the battle as being between "water-carriers" and "water-drinkers". And regulation of any kind is deeply resisted, even after a disaster as sweeping as the 2008 crash.

This debate is going to be crystallized in the Goldman case. Much of America is going to reflexively insist that Goldman's only crime was being smarter and better at making money than IKB and ABN-Amro, and that the intrusive, meddling government (in the American narrative, always the bad guy!) should get off Goldman's Armani-clad back. Another side is going to argue that Goldman winning this case would be a rebuke to the whole idea of civilization - which, after all, is really just a collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even when we can. It's an important moment in the history of modern global capitalism: whether or not to move forward into a world of greed without limits.

April 05, 2010

Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind's true liberation Aquarius! Aquarius!

So sang the Fifth Dimension. There was to be a forthcoming paradigm shift from the old paradigm of war, acquisitiveness, competition, ticky tack houses, jealousy, suspicion, exclusiveness to a new paradigm of peace, love, cooperation, trust, inclusiveness. There was to be more sharing and less money grubbing, everyone was to be entitled to a good life - no more poverty, no more racism. Harmony and understanding, no more hypocrisy. And everyone could lead a fulfilling life of satisfaction.

What happened? The paradigm never shifted, that's what. Instead of a new paradigm, what happened instead was that the old paradigm intensified. We got more war, a more intensified rat race, more McMansions. Instead of the mind's true revelation we got ... Ronald Reagan! We got fed more drivel about "Morning in America." We got more exploitation, more commercialism. In fact the Age of Aquarius itself was commercialized! Instead of hippies with bell bottoms and tie died shirts, we got J Crew and Abercrombie and Fitch. We got an ever expanding and all inclusive military-industrial complex. We got hedge funds and credit default swaps.

True, the new paradigm was just too risky. Trust and unlocked doors led to the murderous perversion of the Manson family. People withdrew into more conservative lifestyles after criminals took advantage of the trust and openness. The paradigm never shifted. Things went back to business as usual. Students, once relieved of the draft, became more conservative. We entered a 40 year period where Republican politics held sway. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had all been killed. A dream deferred became a dream that, for all intents and purposes, had died. The CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in South America only to replace them with repressive governments, military dictatorships and the Chicago Boys - disciples of Milton Friedman dedicated to the libertarian dream of privatization, deregulation and free trade - a free trade, incidentally, that President Clinton recently admitted had ruined Haiti's rice farmers. It was good to be greedy. Sharing was for the birds. Egotism and arrogance were back in fashion. The USA was number 1, and don't you forget it, baby.

Ronald Reagan initiated the tax break mantra that would lead to all good things including increased government revenues, according to the Laffer curve. Free trade would open up brave, new vistas where American goods and American ideas were exported everywhere. Instead American jobs were exported. Trade and national deficits grew. NAFTA produced that "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot had predicted. The one Democratic President during this period, Bill Clinton, got co-opted and then impeached for his efforts. The Laffer curve turned out to be a fake. The US having lowered taxes collected less revenues and went further into debt. American markets were flooded with cheap foreign imports. THe US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor nation. The US was reduced to begging China to revalue its currency because having invested its prestige in the libertarian philosophy of Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand of free trade, deregulation and privatization, it could not go back even when it became obvious in the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008 that this philosophy had left the US in a shambles, fast becoming a Third World nation left in the dust by the rest of the developed and developing world.

No, when the paradigm really needed to shift from the lower taxes, smaller government crowd, when the libertarian paradigm had proven to be a fraud and a failure, Americans hung on ever more tightly to the outmoded paradigm - America is the best and the wisest nation on earth. We're the leaders. We "won" the Cold War. We're number 1. Even after China had become our banker, loaning us the money to fight ridiculous, unwinnable wars of aggression while leaving our borders undefended, even after the middle class had lost ground under the old paradigm of less government (more deregulation), even after Alan Greenspan had admitted that the banks had not regulated themselves but had screwed up everything and then were rewarded with billions of dollars of taxpayer money, Americans clung to the old paradigm of getting government off their backs and out of their lives. As Ronald Reagan had said: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'". Americans still clung to the happy homilies of "Morning in America."

Barack Obama was elected to bring about change, but change is the last thing American corporations wanted. They clung to the old paradigm with a vengeance. They spent untold millions on lobbyists whose job was to guarantee that there would be no change. The left, which had been so vocal in the sixties, replaced the right as the silent majority with no vision for an America any different from the status quo plus maybe a little extra for the middle class. The right amped up its rhetoric to the point that a health care reform bill became "Armageddon." A bill that guaranteed that there would be only privatized health care corporations which were to be delivered 30 million new customers became socialism. It was unthinkable even to advocate for real socialism. Everything had to be couched in the rhetoric of the right. Reform had to be acceptable to the large corporations. Even human genes had been privatized and patented to the point that biotech companies owned the genes responsible for early onset breast cancer and would send "cease and desist" letters to any other party that had the audacity and temerity to want to do further research regarding them.

Barack Obama had his work cut out for him. No longer was it acceptable to have a War on Poverty. The poor and homeless continued to accumulate on the streets of America as jobs continued to dry up. But Americans considered it immoral for the government to use their tax money to try to help them. It was not immoral, however, to use their tax money to fight wars of aggression on foreign soil while ignoring the real war raging on the border. Arcane rules in the Senate allowed a determined bunch of paid off politicians to stop any progress whatsoever even after the prevailing conservative philosophy had produced the catastrophe of the Great Recession. The big banks, even after having been bailed out at taxpayer expense because they were too big to fail, were determined to get even bigger and to hand out even more outrageous bonuses to their executives. The culture of money and accumulation was intact. Greed was still good. The growing army of bankrupts and the foreclosed upon were losers in the American argot. Americans didn't want their tax money supporting them. Americans, it seemed, only wanted their tax money to go for war and to give corporate welfare to large corporations. They complained that it was socialism and a government takeover when the government took back under its wings the issuance of student loans which had been a cash cow for private corporations at taxpayer expense.

So when the paradigm really needed to shift, Americans wouldn't let it. They were all caught up in the disappearing reality that they were the privileged elite of the world who were entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of the world's garbage. Instead they were becoming Richard Nixon's descriptive term: "pitiful, helpless giants". President Obama had all he could do to get meager health care reform and for his efforts was branded a socialist and a Nazi. He dare not even speak of reducing the deficit by ending the wars and shifting the military-industrial complex budget, larger than that of the rest of the world combined, to more productive purposes like alternative energy production and high speed rail. No, people still wanted lower taxes. They didn't care if their taxes were lowered by just a few dollars while the large corporations had theirs lowered by millions. They didn't care if lower taxes increased the national debt. They didn't care if more futile offensive wars increased the national debt while actual defenae could be had for a relative pittance and the savings used for peaceful purposes. Just don't tread on them.

When the handwriting was on the wall, when the old pardigm had completely failed, when the paradigm really needed to shift, Americans clung to the old paradigm with a vengeance. Even as large corporations took control over their lives, they clung to their freedom, misidentifying the source of its diminution as the government itself rather than the government as controlled by private corporations by means of their lobbyists, campaign contributions and TV advertising. After all how can there be a national debate when the chief advertisers on "Meet the Press" are the Boeing Corporation (chief defense contractor) and the Exxon Corporation (major oil producer). Do you think the debate on Meet the Press is going to be critical of the military-industrial complex or the oil industry?

So while America treads water, despite the heroic efforts of President Obama and a few Democrats to turn around the ship of state and enter a new paradigm, Americans clamor for smaller government and long for the days in the 1950s when Eisenhauer was President, cars had tail fins and jobs were plentiful.

March 28, 2010

The Tea Party people don't make sense. A lot of them have lost their jobs so they have plenty of time to protest. But to protest what? They want smaller government even as they are sitting there collecting unemployment? A lot of them have lost their houses or their houses are underwater. So they want government, the only entity that is trying to help them, out of their lives? It just doesn't make any sense. I've often wondered - where do these people get time off from work to do all this protesting? Well now the answer is clear. According to a New York Times article, With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party, a lot of them have lost their jobs:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.

Many Tea Party supporters argue for smaller government even as they argue it should do more.

Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.

In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care.

Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.

I guess disgruntled people will seek out and join a movement, any movement. Since this one got started with corporate help and hence is known not as a grass roots movement but an astroturf movement, the activists hold to the illogical position that they want smaller government but more help with the problems they're facing. Logically then, they should ask the corporations not government for help. See where that gets them! It's clear that these people are being used by the right and corporate interests for their own political purposes.

Many Tea Party supporters argue for smaller government even as

they argue it should do more.

Maybe what they really stand for is that government should help them - mostly white middle class people- and not minorities or illegal immigrants in which case their protestations are mainly code for racism and discrimination. Sarah Palin said that what we want is "freedom," and Janis Joplin said, "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose." Well, the Tea Partyers, it sounds like, have nothing else to lose. They've lost their jobs, lost equity in their houses, are on unemployment or social security and now they want government to do for them even as they demand smaller government. In other words they want government to do for them - nice white folks - even as it shuts down programs for the poor.

The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.

Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”

“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.

The fact that many of them joined the Tea Party after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy, with people trading protest signs for paychecks.

But for now, some are even putting their savings into work that they argue is more important than a job — planning candidate forums and get-out-the-vote operations, researching arguments about the constitutional limits on Congress and using Facebook to attract recruits.

“Even if I wanted to stop, I just can’t,” said Diana Reimer, 67, who has become a star of the effort by FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group, to fight the health care overhaul. “I’m on a mission, and time is not on my side.”

A year ago, Ms. Reimer’s husband had been given a choice — retire or be fired. The couple had been trying to sell their split-level home in suburban Philadelphia to pay off some debt and move to a small place in the city.

But real estate agents told them the home would sell for about $40,000 less than they paid 19 years ago — not enough to pay off their mortgage.

Then Ms. Reimer saw a story about the Tea Party on television. “I said, ‘That’s it,’ ” she recalled. “How can you get this frustration out, have your voices heard?”

She liked that the Tea Party was patriotic, too. “They said the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the national anthem,” she said.

She had taken a job selling sportswear at Macy’s. But when her husband found her up early and late taking care of Tea Party business, he urged her to take a leave. When the store did not allow one, she quit.

“I guess I just found my calling,” she said.

While some might find it odd that a group of people living on government support should be protesting against the government, these people are doing what comes naturally to them: not thinking for themselves and falling into a convenient role set up for them by corporate America complete with flag salutations and singing of the National Anthem. The trappings of an America that they once knew and are afraid they are losing is what attracts them to this cause. The Tea Party movement was organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative group organized by Dick Armey, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and life insurance corporations. ThinkProgress reports:

FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that has been the norm for conservative organizations for years. As Obama prepares to push to close corporate tax loopholes, reform health care, and transition to a clean energy economy, we can expect more corporate lobbyists to create astroturf protests to oppose change.

So all these old people are protesting for an America they thought they knew in bygone days. It's nostalgia for the past fully capitalized upon by corporate lobbyists. In other words the Tea Partyers, unbeknownst even to themselves, are carrying the water for corporate America, and what does corporate America want? It wants smaller government (read "deregulation"); it wants government out of corporate America's life. The Tea Partyers, who are collecting social security and unemployment insurance checks, don't really want government out of their lives if it means they won't get their government checks any more. They just don't want groups other than themselves to get any government help. Their Weltanschaaung has been given to them by corporate America. Their mantras and slogans have been given to them by corporate America. Just as corporate America has given them their pills and their nursing homes, they like the look and feel of the ads and literature with that friendly and concerned hue that has been given to them by corporate America even as corporate America has continued to fleece them. Only don't blame corporate America for the fact that your lives aren't what they used to be. Blame government. Dick Armey and FreedomWorks have cleverly shifted the blame from corporate America to government. Corporate America has given them a cocoon within which to operate - a nice warm Snuggy.

The Tea Party movement is all about nostalgia for the trappings of mid-twentieth century America, and those trappings have been conveniently provided to them by corporate America so they don't have to think critically for themselves. They can just salute the flag, sing "God Bless America" and say "Thank you for your service" to all the veterans present.

Jeff McQueen, 50, began organizing Tea Party groups in Michigan and Ohio after losing his job in auto parts sales. “Being unemployed and having some time, I realized I just couldn’t sit on the couch anymore,” he said. “I had the time to get involved.”

He began producing what he calls the flag of the Second American Revolution, and drove 700 miles to campaign for Mr. Brown under its banner. Flag sales, so far, are not making him much. But he sees a bigger cause.

“The founding fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,” he said. “They believed in it so much that they would sacrifice. That’s the kind of loyalty to this country that we stand for.”

He blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”

He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.

“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.

Tea Party groups like FreedomWorks recognize that they are benefiting from the labor of many people who have been hit hard economically. But its chairman, the former House majority leader Dick Armey, argued that their ranks will remain strong — and connected — even as members find work.

“I see these folks as pretty much the National Guard,” Mr. Armey said. “They will go back to their day jobs, they will go back to their Little League and their bridge club. But they will have their activism at the ready, and they will stay in touch.”

Mr. Grimes, for his part, is thinking of getting a part-time job with the Census Bureau. But he is also planning, he said, to teach high school students about the Constitution and limits on government powers.

“I don’t think that the unemployment thing is going to change,” he said.

Jeff McQueen rightly blames free trade for the loss of jobs in America. And it's true that the government has promoted free trade, but at whose behest? Government has been lobbied extensively by corporate America for free trade because it benefits US transnational corporations, and it is a conservative article of faith that that's the way it should be. The conservative administrations of the last 30 years starting with Ronald Reagan have implemented free trade. To be honest, the Republican-lite Clinton administration did also, but Clinton recently has seen the error of his ways and recanted. ("I have to live every day with the consequences of what I did."). The Obama administration and Democrats in general are fighting back on free trade. Mr. McQueen needs to make a distinction between those who aid and abet and use government to promote corporate interests and those who are fighting back against the corporate takeover of government. It's not about a government takeover; it's about a corporate takeover of government which uses bought and paid for politicians, lobbyists and TV ads to convince the likes of Mr. McQueen that corporations are good, government is bad, even as they use government to promote corporate interests at the expense of Middle America.

March 27, 2010

With the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, one would think that most Americans would be rejoicing in the fact that they won't ever have to lie in a hospital bed and get a letter from their insurance company that they've been dropped. They should be rejoicing that they can never be denied coverage because of a preexisitng condition. And the list of things to rejoice over goes on and on. I suspect that the majority of Americans are rejoicing. But there's a vocal minority who see this bill as the end of civilized life as we know it. How can this be so? It's so because the right wing spin machine has gone into overtime and overdrive. They realize that it's possible to convince a certain number of people that what is actually good for them is in fact bad for them. It's not enough that they convinced a lot of poor whites to vote for Republican Presidents that have systematically transferred wealth from them to the upper classes. They now delight in the fact that they can convince people of absolutely anything. For example, they can convince people that down is up, that white is black, that a mini Krystal Nacht is absolutely justified, that drinking paint thinner is the latest diet craze. Whatever!

TV advertising moguls must be feeling a sense of power knowing that they can get anybody to do and say anything based on their representations of a fact, a person or an issue. The Republican party and the Tea Partyers have long been into demonizing things they don't like. Calm debate? Phooey, who needs that? You just demonize the other side. That's how you win. You make preposterous claims about the other side with absolute authority and that carries the day. After all that's how good lawyers make millions - by convincing juries that black is white, that up is down, that their client is innocent when they know he's guilty. That's how they make their money. They've managed to convince millions that health care reform which might save their life some day is the absolute ruination of life in America. Next they'll convince people that they should all eat dog food. After all didn't Jim Jones convince a whole bunch of people to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide? Reagan managed to convince some people that ketchup is a vegetable, that selling arms to the Ayatollah was a good idea. How stupid and gullible do these people think we are?

A major subject in elementary school should be critical thinking. Not only should young people be taught to question authority, they should be taught to question EVERYTHING - especially TV advertising. How many times do I need to see the Boniva commercial? I was informed about it the first time I saw it. But I'm subjected to it over and over and over again. The same thing goes for political ads. But the right wing has a special niche: they plug into all the resentment, anger and hatred that's out there. They demonize. They ridicule. They cast aspersions. They castigate. In short they use any possible negative psychological technique that they can to intimidate or to incite a riot or even mob violence. One would have to study the Ku Klux Klan to get an idea of the techniqes of psychological manipulation that use hatred and anger to motivate people and buy the snake oil that they're selling.

And of course salesmen and saleswomen are what these people are - salesmen and saleswomen of hate. They like to strut around with guns strapped to their hips - "open carry" it's called. Talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck like to whip up hysteria because that's what drives up their ratings and makes them more money. Hitler only whipped up mass hysteria for political gain. These guys whip it up for financial gain. And of course hypocrisy is an immense component of their sales campaign. Any salesman is engaging in hypocrisy if he doesn't really believe that what he's selling is good for you, only good for him in that he'll make money off of you. But these guys have turned hypocrisy into an art form. They pride themselves on the fact that they can convince you of something which they know in their heart is bad for you. They will do their utmost to tap the latent anger and hatred that resides within all of us at some level. They will appeal to the basest of human instincts. They know that at some level, black, white or brown, we are all racists.

Hitler, after all, only appealed to racist pride to win over his converts. The Sarah Palins, Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the world bring out the worst in people over health care? That's pretty amazing. Hitler was a talented speaker who was the first to acknowledge in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that he got to where he got to solely based on his ability to manipulate crowds with his speaking ability. Today we have a whole assortment of mini Hitlers like the aforementioned whose motivation is primarily financial. They are lining their own pockets as they proceed to whip their audiences up into a political hysteria. Suddenly people who profess to be outraged by abortion language in the new health care bill which doesn't even exist are threatening to kill the (live) children of politicians who voted for the bill. So kill the innocent who are alive in the name of stopping the killing of those who are as yet unborn? Does this make any sense? The talk show hosts and political agitators from the right have made an art form out of illogic, hypocrisy and outright lying. It seems that some people would rather believe a lie that's based on hatred than the truth that's based on compassion. It's all about venting their anger. And the demagogues are only too willing and interested in showing them how to vent their anger and which are the appropriate targets for doing so. It's Germany in the 30s all over again or deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say. Only this time you have multiple mini Hitlers in it for financial gain instead of one megalomaniac who really believed in Aryan supremacy.

Reality has certainly been fictionalized and sad to say people are only all too willing to believe the fictionalized version rather than to accept reality itself for what it is.

March 09, 2010

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.The U.S. incarceration rate on December 31, 2008 was 754 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents.The USA also has the highest total documented prison and jail population in the world.

2,304,115 were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails in 2008. In addition, according to a December 2009 BJS report, there were 92,854 held in juvenile facilities as of the 2006 Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP), conducted by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million inmates, while having four times the population, thus having only about 18% of the US incarceration rate.

A large percentage of those incarcerated are black men. In 2003, 68 percent of prison and jail inmates were members of racial or ethnic minorities, the government said. An estimated 12 percent of all black men in their 20s were in jails or prisons, as were 3.7 percent of Hispanic men and 1.6 percent of white men in that age group, according to the report. According to the New York Times:

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

Those black men not incarcerated have a huge unemployment rate. 34.5 percent of young African American men are unemployed. When you add the number of incarcerated black men to the number of unemployed you have the astounding figure that almost half the adult black male population is either incarcerated or unemployed. And those coming out of jail, the parolees, are not likely to find jobs. When there are six applicants for every job, who's going to hire a black man with a prison record? So it's back to the streets and the continuation of a life of crime. After all five or ten years in prison is a time to network with other criminals and plan and research other more successful exploits when one is released. What other alternative is there? It's not like there is an effort to reintegrate parolees back into society and to find them jobs.

The jobless rate for young black men and women is 30.5 percent. For young blacks -- who experts say are more likely to grow up in impoverished racially isolated neighborhoods, attend subpar public schools and experience discrimination -- race statistically appears to be a bigger factor in their unemployment than age, income or even education. Lower-income white teens were more likely to find work than upper-income black teens, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, and even blacks who graduate from college suffer from joblessness at twice the rate of their white peers.

At the same time that unemployment is hitting Depression era heights, government is doing little or nothing to create jobs specifically for the black community and specifically for black parolees. Blacks usually grow up in impoverished areas and attend sub-standard public schools. At the same time they are exposed to the life of the streets from an early age. They are exposed to black men who have a lot of money but who have made it in a life of crime. There are large incentives for following in this mode. Pimps, drug kings and assorted thugs seem to be the successful ones while routine salarymen are a rare breed. While opportunities diminish in "straight" society, opportunities flourish on the streets.

In addition black culture seems to glorify the street thug. Gangsta rap is ubiquitous. Some black men have made a lot of money rapping about life on the streets - not behind a desk. Life on the streets is more glamorous and attractive. Even going back to Porgy and Bess, you had Sportin' Life, a little disguised character who was most likely a pimp and a drug dealer.

All leave except Bess and Sporting Life, who asks her again to come to New York with him and tries to give her more dope, which she refuses. Porgy chases him away and he and Bess sing about their new happiness. (“Bess, you is my woman now”). All except Porgy leave for the church picnic.

At the picnic, Sporting Life sings about his own brand of religion (“It ain’t necessarily so”). All are getting ready to leave when Crown, hidden in the bushes, calls out to Bess. She tells him she’s Porgy’s woman now, but he won’t let her go. (“What you want wid Bess?”). He pushes her off into the thicket as the boat leaves without her.

And then you have the ubiquitous crime shows on TV like CSI which glamorize criminals. With all these bad influences and incentives and lack of legitimate opportunities, it's no wonder that for many black men the two choices are a life of crime or hanging out on Mama's sofa.

This is from the Washington Post article linked above:

The Obama administration is on a tightrope, balancing the desire to spend billions more dollars to create jobs without adding to the $1.4 trillion national deficit. Yet some policy experts say more attention needs to be paid to the intractable problems of underemployed workers -- those who like Spriggs may lack a high school diploma, a steady work history, job-readiness skills or a squeaky-clean background.

"Increased involvement in the underground economy, criminal activity, increased poverty, homelessness and teen pregnancy are the things I worry about if we continue to see more years of high unemployment," said Algernon Austin, a sociologist and director of the race, ethnicity and economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, which studies issues involving low- and middle-income wage earners.

Earlier this month, District officials said they will use $3.9 million in federal stimulus funds to provide 19 weeks of on-the-job training to 500 18-to-24-year-olds. But even those who receive training often don't get jobs.

"I thought after I finished the [training] program, I'd be working. I only had three jobs with the union and only one of them was longer than a week," Spriggs, a tall slender man wearing a black Nationals cap, said one afternoon while sitting at the table in the living room/dining room in his mother's apartment. "It has you wanting to go out and find other ways to make money. . . . [Lack of jobs is why] people go out hustling and doing what they can to get by."

"Give me a chance to show that I can work. Just give me a chance," added Spriggs, who is on probation for drug possession. "I don't want to think negative. I know the economy is slow. You got to crawl before you walk. I got to be patient. My biggest problem [which prompted the effort to sell drugs] is not being patient."

Many young black men want to do the right thing. They want opportunity to knock. But society is telling them that unless they have a squeaky clean record, there will be few opprtunities for them, and even with a squeaky clean record they will only have a chance of getting a job. When it comes right down to it, there are seemingly more opportunities on the street. But here's the thing. Obama doesn't want to spend taxpayer money to create jobs directly for black men. There are two taboos going there. One, you can't do something directed just at one ethnic group, and, two, you can't spend taxpayer money creating jobs in the public sector like FDR did with the WPA because there would be a huge hue and cry from conservatives that that would be socialism. So whatever Obama does, it has to seem like he's trying to encourage job growth in the private sector.

But, guess what? The private sector doesn't want undereducated, young black men with prison records. I don't think anyone would disagree with that statement because it's the absolute truth.

Some studies examining how employers review black and white job applicants suggest that discrimination may be at play.

"Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men," said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. "Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison."

Society would rather pay the huge costs of incarceration than it would to pay the costs to reintegrate young black men back into society even if it meant creating jobs directly funded by the government. Government programs equal socialism. Government jobs equal socialism. So the price to be paid for avoiding socialism is to have a large black underclass of parolees and unemployed. When life on the streets is too tough, you can always get three square meals a day in prison. No health care insurance? No problem. You can get free medical care in prison. Also you get free health club membership. You can buff up your body lifting weights. And you can get a college education or the equivalent if you so desire. Plenty of time to study. Out in society you get none of the above.

So the US prefers to go on incarcerating people rather than to pay the costs of providing government funded jobs because the private sector sure doesn't want them. The US would rather extend unemployment insurance, which allows the unemployed to sit on their asses on Mama's sofa, than to use the same money to put them to work as FDR did with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. US society would rather pay them to do nothing, to be unproductive, than to pay them to be productive and actually accomplish something and contribute to the betterment of society. A WPA worker could point to the schools or bridges that he actually built as opposed to those collecting unemployment insurance who are essentially on the dole acquiring neither job skills or a sense of satisfaction in a job well done. But then FDR was a socialist. He only saved capitalism, but he was still a socialist. Basically young black men with spotty records are given two choices: join the Army or take your chances with life on the streets. There you either make it big or die or end up in jail with three squares a day and a chance for a buff body.

November 06, 2009

The pharmaceutical industry wants you to think that if you don't have sex like a porn star, you're in need of their drugs.

It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function," according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties -- but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works -- and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills -- containing (how-could-it-not-work) "horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today." Its website promises, "You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal."

But the big swinging dicks of global FSD marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer -- whose stop-gap strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which, using the same logic, has put its money on testosterone.

Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. FSD is "a classic example of starting with some preconceived, and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women’s sexual dysfunctions, based on the male model," said John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical Journal).

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone. Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer’s little blue pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. No wonder: Researchers don’t even know what constitutes a "normal" female testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., (www.orgasminc.org), testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.

A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more diseased than their American counterparts, with "69.6 percent experiencing some form of FSD," according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. Journal editor and urologist Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. "Science is science," he says. "It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data shows." Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps the bottom line Dr. Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid consultant for drug companies, including P&G and Pfizer.

Goldstein established an FSD clinic with Dr. Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including Pfizer, had financial ties to 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ revealed.

"Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose of comprehensive sex education," says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can’t find: your brain and your funny bone.

October 28, 2009

The economy of the US is based on consumerism. 70% of GDP is due to American consumption. Meanwhile, a billion or more people in the world are starving and don't have access to clean water. What is wrong with this picture? If the human race were rational, it would seem that the first order of business would be to see to it that everyone in the world was at least adequately fed and had clean water. Instead there is a lopsided distribution of goods and services with the first world gluttonously hogging much more than its fair share. And for what? So they can die prematurely from obesity?

One third of Americans are overweight or obese. This is the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. While they die of malnutrition and disease in Africa, they die of meganutrition, supersized nutrition and disease in America. Americans are not only overconsumers; they are stupid consumers. If they were intelligent consumers, they would not consume excess calories. They would get off their butts and excercise, and they would organize in such a way as to offshore the extra calories, not their jobs.

This is why private enterprise doesn't work. Because it is only interested in profits, it doesn't see to it that goods, services and even calories are rationally distributed in the world. And that's to the detriment not only of the people who have too little but also to the detriment of the people who have too much. There's no reason why, once a technology is well developed, it can't be distributed throughout the world to bring its benefits to all people in the world. The only thing preventing this is the profit motive and the sheepishness of governments to interfere with private enterprise. For instance, the basic principles of how to obtain clean water and sanitation have been well known for centuries. Yet private companies want to capitalize on clean water by privatizing water systems throughout the world. Instead if governments just did the job in behalf of all their people, not just the ones who could pay, disease would be reduced.

Inequality is one of the biggest threats to peace in the world. The fact that there is a minority of haves and a majority of have nots contributes to tension and war among the world's peoples. Instead of the haves fighting the have nots in asymetrical wars - asymetrical because the haves have advanced weaponry and the have nots have improvised explosive devices - the advanced world would be better off sharing their resources and knowledge with the have nots. Reduction of inequality will make the world a more peaceful place. The only difference between terrorists and warmongers is that the terrorists are poor and hence have weapons-of-poverty while the warmongers of the advanced nations have all the weaponry money can buy.

The US needs to back off from worshipping the profit motive and devoting itself to the military-industrial complex, pouring money into war and weaponry, and to start redistributing its knowledge and resources to the rest of the world. It's not only the right thing to do; it will bring about more fruitful results. There is overconsumption in American life leading to death, and there is underconsumption in the poorest parts of the world leading to death.

War mongers and profiteers are literally sucking the life blood out of American society turning the US itself into a nation of haves and have nots. Capitalism is devouring itself while it is intent on devouring the rest of the world. The only problem is that the US is running out of natural resources so it must import them from the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is starting to realize that they can charge the US big bucks for these resources. It just doesn't have to give them away. Therefore, the US needs to become more self-sufficient at the same time that it needs to divulge its technology at the level of human needs to the rest of the world. Production of clean water and development of sanitation systems is not rocket science. It is infrastructure and infrastructure development is best undertaken by governments not private enterprise.

The US needs to discourage the rampant greed that now runs the country and results in banks hiring lobbyists - six for every Congressperson - to influence government to develop policies in the interest of banks. And its all for the purpose of making huge sums of money for some people in the right positions who contribute nothing in terms of production of real goods and services much less in terms of rationalizing the distribution of water, sanitation, food and medicines in the world. 'We are all in this together' applies to the whole world not just to arbitrarily drawn nation states on a map. National borders are artificial contrivances. The technology to develop a good and decent lifestyle for all the world's peoples has been known for some time. The systems for putting it in place have been held up by greed - wanting to profit off of basic goods and services - and lack of organizational smarts. The human race has been dumb in coming up with methods of organization that are beneficial to human well-being and selfishness accounts for the rest.

A post consumerist society would lay the emphasis on creating a basic, healthy decent way of life for all human beings. From this basic level of well being people could spread out to add the icing to the cake. What is necessary for a basic level of well being is well known: clean water, adequate sanitation, education, health care, decent housing, wholesome food. Those who aren't in a position to provide these things for themselves should be provided for. Those who are in a position to provide more than a basic level of well being for themselves should be free to do so, but this shouldn't be carried to the level where people can gluttonously overprovide for themselves to the detriment of their well being. Those who can afford to eat a zillion calories a day aren't doing any good for themselves. It's in their own best interest if someone steps in and takes away the spoon even if it's the government. Overconsumption just like underconsumption leads to ill health. It's not irrational for governments to step in and say 'Hey, you guys are eating (consuming) too much. You would be better off if you ate (consumed ) less and gave the excess to those guys over there who don't have enough.' Greed and overconsumption kill just as lack of ambition and underconsumption kill.

Free people, who aren't wise enough to limit their consumption and share with people who don't have enough, don't deserve to be free. They're not only killing others; they're killing themselves.

September 21, 2009

It took a good long while for news of the Teabag movement to penetrate the periphery of my consciousness — I kept hearing things about it and dismissing them, sure that the whole business was some kind of joke. Like a Daily Show invention, say. It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of “teabag parties” as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis.

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.

It’s been strange and kind of depressing to watch the conservative drift in this direction. In a way, actually, the Glenn Beck show has been drearily fascinating of late. It’s not often that we get to watch someone go insane on national television; trapped in an echo chamber of his own spiraling egomania, with apparently no one at his network willing to pull the plug and put him out of his misery, Beck has lately gone from being a mildly annoying media dingbat to a self-imagined messiah who looks like he’s shouldering more and more of the burdens of Christ with each passing day. And because he’s stepping into a vacuum of conservative leadership — there’s no one else out there who is offering real red meat to the winger crowd — he’s begun to attract not professional help but apostles, in the form of Chuck Norris (who believes we have to prepare for armed revolution and may prepare a run for “president of Texas”) and pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin’s Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

This new Holy Trinity of right-wing basket cases has been pushing all sorts of crazy hallucinations of late, from Bachmann warning that the Americorps program would eventually be turned into a regime of forced re-education for American youth, to Beck’s meanderings about Obama creating FEMA-run concentration camps to warehouse conservative dissidents, to Norris and Beck stirring up talk of secessionist movements. And a lot of people are having fun with this, because, well, it’s funny. It’s like a Farrelly Brothers version of right-wing political agitation. But it’s also kind of sad.

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated._______

Books

Doug Ramsey: Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul DesmondThis is a great book! Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck formed the heart of one of the best all time jazz groups. Paul was the quintessential intellectual, white jazz musician. A talented writer, he never published anything. However author, Doug Ramsey has collected Paul's letters here. How ironic that now his writing in the form of letters to his father and ex-wife, among others, is finally published showing another window on the mind of this talented person.
A sideman, for the most part, his entire life, the Dave Brubeck Quartet might never have happened at all due to the fact that Paul had managed to offend Dave to the point where he never wanted to see him again. It had to do with a gig that Paul actually was the leader of. Paul wanted to take the summer off to play another gig, and Dave wanted Paul to let him take over the gig at the Band Box in Palo Alto, CA. Paul wouldn't let him and Dave, married with two children, proceeded to starve.
Due to an elaborate publicity campaign, when he realized the error of his ways, Paul managed to worm himself back into Dave's good graces. The rest is history.
This book is remarkable for the insight it gives into a working jazz musician's mind, wonderful pictures and interviews with the significant figures in Paul's life. Author Ramsey, not a remarkable penman himself, has nevertheless done a magnificent job of assembling all these various materials. Unlike a lot of jazz authors, he doesn't overly idolize his subject with the result that you get the feeling that you have met a real person and not a idealized version. That's high praise indeed for any biographer. (*****)